10: Parsons: Looking Forward

Talcott Parsons devised a model of the social system and the processes that reproduced and transformed it over time. He used this to construct an account of the development of human societies from their elementary forms into modern industrial societies, and he applied this in studies of many of the areas now central to the sociology syllabus. However, he is known, if at all, as an irrelevant figure best forgotten.

This neglect reflects the criticisms levelled at him during his lifetime. He has been castigated as a conservative ideologist, a naïve ‘functionalist’, a ‘consensus’ theorist who ignored conflict and power and a purveyor of banal common sense. Many today who reject Parsons’s ideas do so on the basis of these criticisms rather than through a direct reading of his work. Despite attempts by loyal supporters and advocates to claim these criticisms as misunderstandings and misreadings, he has largely been written out of the canon of great sociological thinkers. I hope that this book has dispelled these criticisms by showing that Parsons’s work contains much of value and remains empirically relevant.